December 30, 2012

Today I met Prof Vivek Sarkar from Rice University. We discussed his BOF session “Building an Open Community Runtime (OCR) framework for Exascale Systems” at SC12

Abstract – “Exascale systems will impose a fresh set of requirements on runtime systems that include targeting nodes with hundreds of homogeneous and heterogeneous cores, as well as energy, data movement and resiliency constraints within and across nodes. The goal of this proposed BOF session is to start a new community around the development of open runtime components for exascale systems that we call the Open Community Runtime (OCR). Our hope is that OCR components will help enable community-wide innovation in programming models above the OCR level, in hardware choices below the OCR level, and in runtime systems at the OCR level.”

Prof Barbara Chapman (Secondary Session Leader) – University of Houston will be a keynote at Multicore World 2013 in Wellington, 19-20 February 2013 and Prof Sarkar will be present at Multicore World 2014 in the 3rd week of February.

“Multicore processors are a localized parallel computing system. The vision of connecting the whole world via the Internet gave rise to “cloud” computing. What about “grid” computing? It lost the contest for which “hyped” word will dominate, and there isn’t enough difference between “grid” and “cloud” for the world to need two names. They are both forms of parallel computing. Every cloud programmer contributes to providing parallel work for hungry cores, whether through their own parallel program or concurrency.”

March 10, 2012

Because they’re coming to Wellington later this month, so you can meet them and explore it with them.

And maybe you should, especially if you’re someone involved in IT, like a CIO, a CTO or a software engineer.

Something’s happened in the chip world. A change so fundamental it’s created opportunities to do everything faster, better and cheaper – across the board.

Serial computing is dead. It’s just that most people don’t know it yet. But it is. Intel knows that. So does Google. And ARM, the UK company whose processors drive 90% of the world’s smartphones. Weta Digital’s in the new loop, along with the scientists pitching to have the massive Square Kilometre Array (SKA) located in Australasia.

For all of them, serial computing is and old technology, killed by parallel processing. Parallel processing (PP) relies on newgen chips, not with a single core but with many, even thousands of them. For most people, though, the technology’s less important than the possibilities. Which are immense, according to PP’s champions. Many of whom are coming to Wellington this month for Multicore World 2012, New Zealand’s first heads-up on this IT revolution.

Speakers at Multicore World (March 27-28) include Intel Software Director, James Reinders and Dr Tim Mattson from Intel Labs; John Goodacre, Director, ARM Processor Division; Weta Digital’s CTO, Sebastian Sylwan; Dr Mark Moir from Oracle Labs; Microsoft’s Artur Laksberg as well as the CSIRO’s Dr Tim Cornwell and speakers from the Universities of Melbourne and Otago.

When the “war of chips” becomes mainstream (reaching The Economist in a full article is an example) it means that not only the world is changing, but actually the world is noticing! Hope to have someone from ARM at Multicore World 2012to discuss things with the Intel guys. Had an email from Warren East, CEO of ARM about “considering” their participation: hope that the consideration period don’t last that long….

January 23, 2012

From this article at Electronic Design: “Multicore processors dominate today’s computing landscape. Multicore chips are found in platforms as diverse as Apple’s iPad and the Fujitsu K supercomputer. In 2005, as power consumption limited single-core CPU clock rates to about 3 GHz, Intel introduced the two-core Core 2 Duo. Since then, multicore CPUs and graphics processing units (GPUs) have dominated computer architectures. Integrating more cores per socket has become the way that processors can continue to exploit Moore’s law.”

“But a funny thing happened on the way to the multicore forum: processor utilization began to decrease. At first glance, Intel Sandy Bridge servers, with eight 3-GHz cores, and the Nvidia Fermi GPU, featuring 512 floating-point engines, seem to offer linearly improved multicore goodness.”

“But a worrying trend has emerged in supercomputing, which deploys thousands of multicore CPU and GPU sockets for big data applications, foreshadowing severe problems with multicore. As a percentage of peak mega-floating-point operations per second (Mflops), today’s supercomputers are less than 10% utilized. The reason is simple: input-output (I/O) has not kept pace with multicore millions of instructions per second (MIPS).”

September 1, 2011

Open Parallel presents THE Multicore Conference.
Multicore World 2012 brings together Industry, Academia and Developers Communities to discuss the latest developments in Multicore Software and Hardware and its applications.
In Wellington, NZ. 27-28 March 2012http://www.MulticoreWorld.com